But anger had nothing to do with the exploratory expedition he had led. That strange, hot temper had been brought upon him by the nature of the foe. He could feel the affront to the Machine-God in their essence, in the unholy constructions that they had defiled beyond all heresies.
Their machines, infused with the essence of daemonic warp entities, were the greatest corruption that the adepts of Mars could contemplate, a blasphemy that made all other blasphemies pale. All thinking machineries of the Mechanicus had souls within their flesh, for a soulless sentient machine is the epitome of true evil. And upon the battlefield, raging beyond the concealing clouds of blind-smoke, were machineries that had been polluted by their merging with the soulless entities of the warp. A soulless sentience is the enemy of all.
Such heresies were utterly wrong and Darioq was both revolted and horrified by how low the Legion of the Word Bearers had stooped. He shut off the receptors and synapses that synched his right brain hemisphere and the uncomfortable feelings instantly vanished. All that remained was the irrefutable fact that the enemy made use of sacrilegious, dangerous machineries that were an affront to his god and that they needed to be neutralised, their heresies eradicated and their hold over c6.7.32 removed.
His mechadendrites plugged into the central control column and, connected as he was to the delicate sensors on the outside of the hull, he registered the field of disruption that spread out in a cone from the enemy's tower. At his impulse, the command ship was lowered towards the ground. It was imperative for him to maintain contact and hence control over his thousands of Skitarii warriors. If he were cut off from them and his adepts then his entire army would grind to a halt.
Vast turbine engines rotated in their housings as the airship began to descend, the linking cable that connected it to the holy Ordinatus Magentus drawing it in towards the docking station on its upper deck.
One of the servo-arms of Darioq's quad-manifold rotated, whining softly, and its clamp-like jaws eased open.
'Enginseer Kladdon, open the hiemalis chamber and bring forth my blessed cogitation units.'
One of the red-robed junior priests behind him lowered the head of his power halberd in respect for his master's order and stepped towards one of the walls of the command centre. He spoke the words of awakening as he pressed the buttons of the hiemalis unit ritualistically, timing his speech to coincide with the correct sequence of buttons. With a blessing to the machine-spirit he gripped the sunken circular handle and, as he incanted the correct words beseeching the unit for its acquiescence, he pulled the drawer open.
Fog billowed from the unit as the ice-cold air within reacted to the heat outside. Held within a long shelf were over a dozen carefully stored bell jars. Within each jar was a blessed brain hemisphere held in static charged null-liquid. One of Darioq's servo-arms reached forward, hovering over several of the jars before the magos selected the required unit, and his servo-arm gently lifted it free.
Another servo-arm folded down and grasped the top of one of the bell jars protruding from the massive power generator he bore, and as he muttered the required intonations of supplication, mechadendrites whirred as he loosened the cog-shaped bolts fixing the bell jar to him. Needle-like incision spikes clicked out of the centres of other mechadendrite tentacles and were carefully inserted into the cog-shaped holes revealed with the removed bolts. They turned and with a hissing sound the bell jar was lifted clear. He felt the loss of information and processing power of the brain unit like a vague emptiness within him.
Swiftly and precisely he placed this brain unit within the gap in the hiemalis unit and attached the new bell jar to his core systems. Fresh information that he had not accessed for many centuries flooded through him, including memories and algorithms that had departed from him completely when he had disconnected the brain unit.
Much of the content of this brain unit would have been classed as heretical by some of the priesthood of Mars, but Darioq had felt driven to re-synch with the hemispheres within the bell jar. This was the unit that he had utilised when he had been part of the explorator team that had first investigated planet c6.7.32, and it had none of the synapse burns that altered and neutered many of the right brain functions.
This was a creative brain unit. Only a few secretive and covert members of the priesthood would dare to access such a component. The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question, the tenets said, and for him to utilise a creative thinking brain unit to make adaptations and improvisations to mechanics, as he had done in the past when wired into this particular bell jar, was at best the height of hubris and, at worst, heresy of the worst kind.
His devotion to the Machine-God, Deus Mechanicus, and its conduit manifestation, the Omnissiah, was unwavering. To deny the effectiveness of such a creative drive when prescribed methodology would fail was abject foolishness, but even as these thoughts ran through his mind, he recognised the danger inherent within them. He must not utilise this brain unit for long periods, or he risked his whole being. Such dogmatism is folly, he thought. I must retain my dogmatism, he thought. The conflicting impulses gave him pause, but the new addition was the more dominant presence.
'Tech-priests, go forth and ready the plasma reactors of the Ordinatus. And bring the void shields up to full power.' Magos Technicus Darioq said. The robed figures bowed their cog-bladed power halberds in compliance and left the command shrine.
His cogitator units had judged the potency of the weapons of the enemy and calculated the likelihood of damage to the blessed Ordinatus. Any moderate risk of damage was to be avoided, thus spoke the tenets, and he had previously determined not to advance the giant war machine until the enemy forces had been pushed back by 7.435 Mechanicus standard units, back to the third defensive tier.
Now he thought differently. He remodelled the algorithms of trajectory and manifest firepower, and a flurry of numbers scrolled down the screens lining the walls of the command shrine.
If the energy of the rear void shields was redirected to the frontal arc then the probability of success rose exponentially the more power that he diverted there. Such a thing may be deemed heresy, for the STC explicitly stated the correct shield levels and to alter them was to ignore the teachings of the elders. But if his mission on planet c6.7.32 was compromised then it would be of no matter. He deemed the minor heresy a lesser evil than what would occur if the enemy breached the walls of the xenos structure, and he began the complex calculations necessary to adapt the systems of the Ordinatus to his will.
Scores of Valkyries were being ripped apart by the relentless anti-aircraft fire that speared up through the roiling black clouds. Thousands of the Elysians drop-troopers were slaughtered as they plummeted down through the atmosphere at terminal velocity, but still others survived and Laron prayed that the other storm trooper platoons were amongst them.
It was a baffling experience, to be falling alongside something so massive. They had launched from their Valkyrie above the tower and he had been falling past it for the last few minutes. That such a thing could be so high was inconceivable, the engineering impossible, but there it was in front of his eyes. It made him feel physically ill and he could hear strange voices in his head. The thing seemed to exert a gravitational pull of its own and he angled away from it, so as not to be drawn too close.
'Keep your distance from the tower,' he said into his micro-bead, but the thing merely fed back a blare of roaring, horrifying sounds in his ears and he doubted that any heard his order.